"The Wrath of the Northmen": The Vikings and their Memory "The Wrath of the Northmen": The Vikings and their Memory by Christina von Nolcken ou won't be surprised that the Vikings were normally viewed by those they came up against in a markedly negative light. Certainly this was true in England, the area most of our early records come from, and the one I am most familiar with. Indeed, the story of the Vikings is usually taken--and not just by English historians--as starting and ending with events in England. The end is often considered to be the 1066 invasion of England by the Normans (originally Vikings themselves who had settled in northern France and adopted the language they found there), though Viking-type raids continued, especially in the Scottish islands, until about the end of the twelfth century. The beginning of the Vikings' recorded story--which coincides with the beginning of recorded history for Norway--is usually marked by a Viking raid on a northern English monastery in 793. But 793 wasn't quite the first time the Vikings had caused trouble in England.

Here is the entry for 787 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a work only compiled some century later, though it does seem to have used earlier written sources. 787 [789]. In this year [ . . .] came first three ships of Norwegians from Hørthaland [around Hardanger Fjord]: and then the reeve rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know what they were: and then they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to England. (Garmonsway, 55) What is so striking is the total unexpectedness of this happening. The reeve had expected to find peaceful traders who would take their goods to the royal residence, as was customary. And what he got was people who lived by totally different rules. The event provides a fitting overture for the even more shocking raid in 793. Here is the relevant part of the Chronicle entry for that year: In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air.

A great famine soon followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 [June] the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter. (Garmonsway, 55, 57) It is an event that terrorized the whole of the Western Christian world. This is what one Englishman (Alcuin of York) had to say about it at the time: Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples. [. . .] What should be expected for other places, when the divine judgment has not spared this holy place? (Loyn, 55-6) Well, what could they expect apart from a lot of trouble?

The reach of the raids These raiding peoples emerge out of all three Scandinavian homelands--Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--sending off their young men all over the known world in search of wealth and prestige. The Norwegians kept pushing west, sometimes merely raiding, sometimes also setting up settlements, to the Scottish islands, to Ireland (Dublin was founded as a base particularly for slave trading in 841), to northern England. They occupied the Faeroe Islands (825), Iceland (ca. 870-930), and parts of Greenland (ca. 985), finally setting up outposts also in America (ca. 1000). They pushed south through England, into France, down to the Mediterranean. The Danes expanded westwards along the North Sea coast toward France. They fanned out within France--Paris was sacked in 845 and again in the 860s--and went south to raid in Spain. Pressing through the straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean, they sacked Luna, a small town in northern Italy, apparently thinking it was Rome (860).

They almost completely took over England in the ninth century (with a bit of help from the Norwegians) and, in a later wave of invasion, they provided England's kings from 1013-1035: Swein Forkbeard, Harald II and Cnut. The Swedes traded and colonized around the Baltic. They sailed up Russia's rivers and became the first rulers of the Kievan Russian state. They made their way to Constantinople and the Orient. They served as the bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors. And they certainly did not do all these things without terrorizing a lot of people. As Priit J. Vesilind put it in his "In Search of Vikings" in the May 2000 issue of National Geographic, "In a casually brutal age Vikings were simply better brutes" (Vesilind, 10-11). The English might not have agreed with Vesilind's assessment of the age, but they would have agreed with him about the Vikings. Following those traumatizing early raids there was a lull for about a generation. But then there were two further waves of attack.

The first involved large groups of Danes coming sometimes for loot but also very often to settle in England's green and pleasant land. By the end of the ninth century it seemed they would take over the whole country. The tide was finally turned by King Alfred and his successors, but then there was a second major wave of attacks, heralded by a terse entry in the Chronicle under 981: "In this year for the first time seven ships came and ravaged Southampton" (Garmonsway, 125). And then the English paid, and paid, and paid to try to keep the invaders from laying waste the country--and still they were often plundered. Unfortunately, the English made some very serious mistakes in this later period. In 1002 they indulged in what looks like a stupid effort at ethnic cleansing: 1002. In this year the king and his councillors decided to pay tribute to the fleet and to make peace, on condition they ceased from their evil deeds. [. . .] This was accepted and they were paid twenty-four thousand pounds. Then [. . .] in the same year the king gave orders for all the Danish people who were in England to be slain on St.

Brice's day [13 November], because the king had been told that they wished to deprive him of his life by treachery, and all his councillors after him, and then seize his kingdom. (Garmonsway, 133-5) Among those slain was the sister of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark. The act provoked Swein to an orgy of revenge that reached its climax in 1011--at least according to our monastic chronicler--when the Vikings plundered Canterbury and seized all those in holy orders, including the archbishop Ǽlfhere. The following year they martyred him: 1012. Then on the Saturday the host became greatly incensed against the bishop, because he was not willing to offer them any money, and forbade any ransom to be given for him. Moreover they were very drunk, for wine had been brought to them from the south.

Then they took the bishop, and led him to their tribunal, on Saturday evening, within the octave of Easter [19 April], and pelted him to death with bones and the heads of cattle; and one of them smote him on the skull with the iron [head] of an axe, so that with the blow he sank down and his holy blood fell upon the earth, and his holy soul was sent forth to God's kingdom. (Garmonsway, 142) It seemed to the English that the world was coming to an end. Picturing the Vikings The English weren't the only ones who lived in fear of the Vikings. The French too were traumatized: "From the wrath of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us," they prayed. And at the other end of the known world the Arabs were simply appalled. Ibn Fadhlan, an Arab emissary who met a group of Vikings in the 920s, described them as "the filthiest of Allah's creatures: they do not wash after shitting or peeing, nor after sexual intercourse, and do not wash after eating. They are like wayward donkeys" (Roesdahl, 34).

Elsewhere he provides a detached but terrifying eyewitness account of a Viking ship burial on the Volga (I provide a conveniently abbreviated version of this; I quote at such length because the account is so astonishing): When a chieftain dies, slaves and servants are asked who will die with him. The one who volunteers cannot alter the decision. In this particular case it was a woman who was treated with great courtesy while the burial was being prepared. On the day of the funeral the chieftain's ship was drawn up on land and people walked around it and said words. A bier was placed on it and cloths and cushions laid on it by an old woman called the Angel of Death. She was responsible for the preparations. The dead body which up to now had been laid in a grave was taken up and dressed in splendid garments specially made for the occasion. He was seated among the cushions in the tent on the ship, with alcoholic drink, food, aromatic herbs and all his weapons. Then a dog, two horses, two cows, a cock and a hen were killed and placed in the ship. The woman who was to die went round to each tent in the camp and had sexual intercourse with its owner. After this she performed various other rituals.

She was raised three times above something which looked like a door frame and said: "I see my master sitting in paradise, and it is beautiful and green and with him are men and slaves [or youths] and he calls me. Lead me to him." Then she killed a hen and was taken to the ship, took off her jewellery, drank two beakers and sang, and was finally taken into the tent to her dead master by the Angel of Death. Six men followed her into the tent and had sexual intercourse with her, then she was killed. The closest relatives of the deceased now lit the firewood under the ship. Others threw more flaming brands on the fire and within one hour everything was burnt. Then they built a mound on the spot and raised a pole at its centre with the name of the chieftain and his king on it, and went away. (Roesdahl, 157) This picture of the Vikings as primitive, ruthless, and often revolting marauders comes, of course, mainly from their victims, though it is corroborated by onlookers like Ibn Fadhlan. It is also relatively well known to us; it has, for example, helped inspire some striking artwork.

But it is not a picture that has enjoyed any kind of continuous existence, even among the descendants of the people the Vikings traumatized. Let me elaborate very briefly on this point, as it is quite fascinating to follow the different ways in which the Vikings have been perceived in the centuries separating them from our own (here I draw my information mainly from Lars Lönnroth's chapter in Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings). For a while, it seems, the Vikings were largely forgotten except within Scandinavia itself. There, and especially in Iceland, they were remembered as glorious warriors and explorers, inhabitants of a kind of golden age, until about the end of the fourteenth century. Then they began to be downplayed even in Scandinavia by historians anxious to claim a place for their countries in the civilized world. Only in the late eighteenth century did they come into their own again, this time in a thoroughly romanticized form, as the ultimate in Noble Savages.

As such, they were caught up by various nationalistic movements--by the Gothic Society in Stockholm, for example, that consisted of academics and military personnel drinking from horns and reciting Nordic poetry in the hope this would help the country in its struggles against Russia, or by Danish schoolmasters wanting to replace the study of Latin with Old Norse. As we move into the nineteenth century we also increasingly find the Vikings again making their mark abroad. Most notoriously, they did this in nineteenth-century Germany, where Old Norse and early Germanic mythology achieved a new religious significance in the hands of Richard Wagner (1813-83). Things took a dangerous turn when such ideas began merging with Nietzsche's philosophy of superman, giving rise to the various racist ideas of German supremacy that culminated in the horrors of World War II. A strong anti-Viking reaction almost immediately followed. The Vikings were not entirely forgotten after World War II, but they certainly stopped being lionized. Instead, they were turned into the comic anti-heroes of popular culture--ones like Hagar the Horrible.

And while this was happening the scholars--here assisted by developments in archaeology--were busy downplaying the Vikings' activities as fighters and concentrating instead on their activities as traders and on how they regularly settled down as highly respectable farmers--and took rather more baths than our Arab commentator indicates. These sanitized Vikings are, on the whole, the Vikings we are mainly familiar with today. In the aftermath of the millennial anniversary of the Vikings' discovery of America, however, things seem ripe for change. For in several of the publications marking this anniversary--and here I am thinking especially of some accompanying art work--we see the Vikings coming into their own once again as fighters, and larger-than-life ones at that. It is a picture that would have been all-too-familiar to their medieval contemporaries. For a list of sources cited in this article, click here . ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Christina von Nolcken Christina von Nolcken studied in England at Oxford University, where she specialized in Medieval English Language and Literature. After teaching for three years at St. Anne's College, Oxford, she moved to the University of Chicago where she is associate professor in the Department of English and the College and chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies.

She regularly teaches courses on Old and Middle English language and literature and the history of the English language. Most of her writing has been on texts prepared by the followers of John Wyclif (d. 1384) as part of their program to bring education, and especially religious education, to the people. COPYRIGHT | A version of this article was delivered as a lecture at the October 2000 Humanities Open House at the University of Chicago. Copyright 2001 The University of Chicago.

(c) 2004 The University of Chicago :: Please direct questions or comments to furlong@lib.uchicago.edu Vikings Sack the Monastery and Library of Lindisfarne in the First Viking Raid on Britain (June 8, 793) : HistoryofInformation.com Visit HistoryofScience.com » Vikings Sack the Monastery and Library of Lindisfarne in the First Viking Raid on Britain (June 8, 793) In the first Viking raid on Britain, on June 8, 793 , Vikings , sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne , a center of learning famous across the continent, built on a tidal island off the northeast coast of England, including its library among their spoils. "Monks were killed in the [Lindisfarne] abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay four years earlier, but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The Viking devastation of Northumbria 's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Europe.

'Never before has such an atrocity been seen,' declared the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York . More than any other single event, the attack on Lindisfarne cast a shadow on the perception of the Vikings for the next twelve centuries. Not until the 1890s did scholars outside Scandinavia begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Vikings, recognizing their artistry, the technological skills and the seamanship" (quoted from the Wikipedia article on the Viking Age, accessed 11-22-2008). "Monasteries were a favoured target due to the riches which were contained in them. Jarrow was invaded in 794 and Iona in 795, 802 and 806. After repeated raids by the Norsemen, the monks of Lindisfarne fled the monastery in AD 875, taking the venerated relics of Saint Cuthbert with them for safekeeping" ( , accessed 11-22-2008).

(This entry was last revised on 12-23-2016.) BBC - History - Loot: Why the Vikings Came to Britain Loot: Why the Vikings Came to Britain By Lindisfarne sacked Lindisfarne - site of the first Viking raid © Alcuin was a scholar and monk living in Germany, who, when he heard the news of the raid on Lindisfarne, wrote long letters to the Northumbrian king and to the Bishop of Lindisfarne. In these he commiserates with their plight and blames it on the sinful lives of their people. 'Consider carefully, brothers, and examine diligently, lest perchance this unaccustomed and unheard-of evil was merited by some unheard-of evil practice… Consider the dress, the way of wearing the hair, the luxurious habits of the princes and people.' Letter from Alcuin to Ethelred, King of Northumbria 'It was unthinkable that such a holy place should suffer attack from foreign heathens.' The raid of 793 was the first recorded Viking raid on Britain, and Alcuin's words express the horror of his Christian world at the ferocity of pagan raiders, whose attack was sudden, unexpected and devastating.

It was unthinkable that such a holy place should suffer attack from foreign heathens, that its monks should be slaughtered and its treasures taken. Yet this was to happen again and again to other monasteries throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Alcuin's letters are just one piece of historical evidence for Viking attacks. Other raids were recorded in the annals kept in monasteries at Iona and in Ireland - an entry for 794 in the 'Annals of Ulster' tells of '... devastation of all the islands of Britain' - while Columba's famous monastery on the Scottish island of Iona was pillaged the following year, and again in 802, in 806 and in 825. Nowhere was safe from the Vikings. The History of English - Old English (c. 500 - c.1100) (from BBC ) More important than the Celts and the Romans for the development of the English language, though, was the succession of invasions from continental Europe after the Roman withdrawal. No longer protected by the Roman military against the constant threat from the Picts and Scots of the North, the Celts felt themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack.

Around 430AD, the ambitious Celtic warlord Vortigern invited the Jutish brothers Hengest and Horsa (from Jutland in modern-day Denmark), to settle on the east coast of Britain to form a bulwark against sea raids by the Picts, in return for which they were "allowed" to settle in the southern areas of Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. But the Jutes were not the only newcomers to Britain during this period. Other Germanic tribes soon began to make the short journey across the North Sea. The Angles (from a region called Angeln, the spur of land which connects modern Denmark with Germany) gradually began to settle in increasing numbers on the east coast of Britain, particularly in the north and East Anglia. The Frisian people, from the marshes and islands of northern Holland and western Germany, also began to encroach on the British mainland from about 450 AD onwards. Still later, from the 470s, the war-like Saxons (from the Lower Saxony area of north-western Germany) made an increasing number of incursions into the southern part of the British mainland.

Over time, these Germanic tribes began to establish permanent bases and to gradually displace the native Celts. SOUND CLIP Click here for transcript and translation All these peoples all spoke variations of a West Germanic tongue, similar to modern Frisian, variations that were different but probably close enough to be mutually intelligible. The local dialect in Angeln is, at times, even today recognizably similar to English, and it has even more in common with the English of 1,000 years ago. Modern Frisian, especially spoken, bears an eerie resemblance to English, as can be seen by some of the Frisian words which were incorporated into English, like miel (meal), laam (lamb), goes (goose), b�ter (butter), tsiis (cheese), see (sea), boat (boat), stoarm (storm), rein (rain), snie (snow), frieze (freeze), froast (frost), mist (mist), sliepe (sleep), blau (blue), trije (three), fjour (four), etc.

The influx of Germanic people was more of a gradual encroachment over several generations than an invasion proper, but these tribes between them gradually colonized most of the island, with the exception of the more remote areas, which remained strongholds of the original Celtic people of Britain. Originally sea-farers, they began to settle down as farmers, exploiting the rich English farmland. The rather primitive newcomers were if anything less cultured and civilized than the local Celts, who had held onto at least some parts of Roman culture. No love was lost between the two peoples, and there was little integration between them: the Celts referred to the European invaders as �barbarians� (as they had previously been labelled themselves); the invaders referred to the Celts as weales (slaves or foreigners), the origin of the name Wales. IMAGE (from Wikipedia ) Although many of the Romano-Celts in the north of England had already been Christianized, St. Augustine and his 40 missionaries from Rome brought Christianity to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of the rest of England in 597 AD. After the conversion of the influential King Ethelbert of Kent, it spread rapidly through the land, carrying literacy and European culture in it wake.

Augustine was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 601 AD and several great monasteries and centres of learning were established particularly in Northumbria (e.g. Jarrow, Lindisfarne). The Celts and the early Anglo-Saxons used an alphabet of runes, angular characters originally developed for scratching onto wood or stone. The first known written English sentence, which reads "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman", is an Anglo-Saxon runic inscription on a gold medallion found in Suffolk, and has been dated to about 450-480 AD. The early Christian missionaries introduced the more rounded Roman alphabet (much as we use today), which was easier to read and more suited for writing on vellum or parchment. The Anglo-Saxons quite rapidly adopted the new Roman alphabet, but with the addition of letters such as ("wynn"), � (�thorn�), � (�edh� or �eth�) and 3 (�yogh�) from the old runic alphabet for certain sounds not used in Latin.

later became "uu" and, still later, "w"; � and � were used more or less interchangeably to represent the sounds now spelled with �th�; and 3 was used for "y", "j" or "g" sounds. In addition, the diphthong � (�ash�) was also used; "v" was usually written with an "f"; and the letters "q", "x" and "z" were rarely used at all. The Latin language the missionaries brought was still only used by the educated ruling classes and Church functionaries, and Latin was only a minor influence on the English language at this time, being largely restricted to the naming of Church dignitaries and ceremonies (priest, vicar, altar, mass, church, bishop, pope, nun, angel, verse, baptism, monk, eucharist, candle, temple and presbyter came into the language this way).

However, other more domestic words (such as fork, spade, chest, spider, school, tower, plant, rose, lily, circle, paper, sock, mat, cook, etc) also came into English from Latin during this time, albeit substantially altered and adapted for the Anglo-Saxon ear and tongue. More ecclesiastical Latin loanwords continued to be introduced, even as late as the 11th Century, including chorus, cleric, creed, cross, demon, disciple, hymn, paradise, prior, sabbath, etc. SOUND CLIP (from Wikipedia ) About 400 Anglo-Saxon texts survive from this era, including many beautiful poems, telling tales of wild battles and heroic journeys. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is �C�dmon's Hymn�, which was composed between 658 and 680, and the longest was the ongoing �Anglo-Saxon Chronicle�. But by far the best known is the long epic poem �Beowulf�.

�Beowulf� may have been written any time between the 8th and the early 11th Century by an unknown author or authors, or, most likely, it was written in the 8th Century and then revised in the 10th or 11th Century. It was probably originally written in Northumbria, although the single manuscript that has come down to us (which dates from around 1000) contains a bewildering mix of Northumbrian, West Saxon and Anglian dialects. The 3,182 lines of the work shows that Old English was already a fully developed poetic language by this time, with a particular emphasis on alliteration and percussive effects. Even at this early stage (before the subsequent waves of lexical enrichment), the variety and depth of English vocabulary, as well as its predilection for synonyms and subtleties of meanings, is evident. For example, the poem uses 36 different words for hero, 20 for man, 12 for battle and 11 for ship.

There are also many interesting "kennings" or allusive compound words, such as hronrad (literally, whale-road, meaning the sea), banhus (bone-house, meaning body) and beadoleoma (battle-light, meaning sword). Of the 903 compound nouns in �Beowulf�, 578 are used once only, and 518 of them are known only from this one poem. Old English was a very complex language, at least in comparison with modern English. Nouns had three genders (male, female and neuter) and could be inflected for up to five cases. There were seven classes of �strong� verbs and three of �weak� verbs, and their endings changed for number, tense, mood and person. Adjectives could have up to eleven forms. Even definite articles had three genders and five case forms as a singular and four as a plural. Word order was much freer than today, the sense being carried by the inflections (and only later by the use of propositions). Although it looked quite different from modern English on paper, once the pronunciation and spelling rules are understood, many of its words become quite familiar to modern ears.

Many of the most basic and common words in use in English today have their roots in Old English, including words like water, earth, house, food, drink, sleep, sing, night, strong, the, a, be, of, he, she, you, no, not, etc. Interestingly, many of our common swear words are also of Anglo-Saxon origin (including tits, fart, shit, turd, arse and, probably, piss), and most of the others were of early medieval provenance. Care should be taken, though, with what are sometimes called "false friends", words that appear to be similar in Old English and modern English, but whose meanings have changed, words such as wif (wife, which originally meant any woman, married or not), fugol (fowl, which meant any bird, not just a farmyard one), sona (soon, which meant immediately, not just in a while), won (wan, which meant dark, not pale) and f�st (fast, which meant fixed or firm, not rapidly). During the 6th Century, for reasons which are still unclear, the Anglo-Saxon consonant cluster "sk" changed to "sh", so that skield became shield.

This change affected all "sk" words in the language at that time, whether recent borrowings from Latin (e.g. disk became dish) or ancient aboriginal borrowings (e.g. skip became ship). Any modern English words which make use of the "sk" cluster came into the language after the 6th Century (i.e. after the sound change had ceased to operate), mainly, as we will see below, from Scandinavia. Then, around the 7th Century, a vowel shift took place in Old English pronunciation (analogous to the Great Vowel Shift during the Early Modern period) in which vowels began to be pronouced more to the front of the mouth. The main sound affected was "i", hence its common description as "i-mutation" or "i-umlaut" (umlaut is a German term meaning sound alteration). As part of this process, the plurals of several nouns also started to be represented by changed vowel pronunciations rather than changes in inflection.

These changes were sometimes, but not always, reflected in revised spellings, resulting in inconsistent modern words pairings such as foot/feet, goose/geese, man/men, mouse/mice, as well as blood/bleed, foul/filth, broad/breadth, long/length, old/elder, whole/hale/heal/health, etc. SOUND CLIP (from National Education Network ) By the time Alfred the Great came to the throne in 871, most of the great monasteries of Northumbria and Mercia lay in ruins and only Wessex remained as an independent kingdom. But Alfred, from his capital town of Winchester, set about rebuilding and fostering the revival of learning, law and religion. Crucially, he believed in educating the people in the vernacular English language, not Latin, and he himself made several translations of important works into English, include Bede�s �Ecclesiastical History of the English People�. He also began the �Anglo-Saxon Chronicle�, which recounted the history of England from the time of Caesar's invasion, and which continued until 1154.

He is revered by many as having single-handedly saved English from the destruction of the Vikings, and by the time of his death in 899 he had raised the prestige and scope of English to a level higher than that of any other vernacular language in Europe. The West Saxon dialect of Wessex became the standard English of the day (although the other dialects continued nontheless), and for this reason the great bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex. The following paragraph from Aelfrich�s 10th Century �Homily on St. Gregory the Great� gives an idea of what Old English of the time looked like (even if not how it sounded): Eft he axode, hu ��re �eode nama w�re �e hi of comon. Him w�s geandwyrd, ��t hi Angle genemnode w�ron.

�a cw�� he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for �an �e hi engla wlite habba�, and swilcum gedafena� ��t hi on heofonum engla geferan beon." A few words stand out immediately as being identical to their modern equivalents (he, of, him, for, and, on) and a few more may be reasonably easily guessed (nama became the modern name, comon became come, w�re became were, w�s became was).

But several more have survived in altered form, including axode (asked), hu (how), rihtlice (rightly), engla (angels), habba� (have), swilcum (such), heofonum (heaven), and beon (be), and many more have disappeared completely from the language, including eft (again), �eode (people, nation), cw�� (said, spoke), gehatene (called, named), wlite (appearance, beauty) and geferan (companions), as have special characters like � (�thorn�) and � (�edh� or �eth�) which served in Old English to represent the sounds now spelled with �th�. SOUND CLIP Vikings in Ireland Everyday Life The Coming of the Vikings Who were the Vikings? They were a group of people who originated in modern-day Denmark and Norway. In the 700s, pressure on land in Scandanavia had forced many nobles and warriors to seek land elsewhere. Some of these were younger sons, who stood to inherit nothing of their father's estate. Noblemen with little to lose began to gather together groups of warriors and go down the coast pillaging settlements.

They sold their booty for money, much like the black markets of today, and this became the means of making their living. The invention of the longboat made it possible for these warriors to sail across the North Sea to attack Britain, France and Ireland as well. In these areas they became known as the "Norsemen" (literally, north-men) and laterally as the "Vikings". They called themselves "Ostmen". The Vikings who first attacked Ireland were Norwegian while those in Britain were usually Danish. Being pagans, the Vikings did not have any respect for Christian symbols and sites. The picture on the left shows the Oseberg Ship, a reconstructed Viking raiding boat (Photo by Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Oslo) . The first raids in the British Isles was in 793, when the great monastery at Lindisfarne was sacked. In Ireland, Rathlin island monastery was burned by the Vikings in 795. Other prominent monasteries that were attacked included Holmpatrick, Inishmurray, Inishbofin and Sceilg Mhicil. Sceilg Mhicil's abbot died of thirst as a Viking prisoner.

St Colum Cille's great monastery at Iona was burned in 802. For the next 30-40 years, the Vikings engaged in hit-and-run raids where they landed a small number of ships at a settlement, spent a few days pillaging and burning it before heading back to Scandanavia to sell their booty. The Vikings were after two types of booty - riches and slaves - which they carried off to sell. They soon found that the monasteries were the richest sources of both goods and this is why monasteries suffered so much. However, the Vikings also attacked a lot of gr�d Fh�ne (commoner's) dwellings. The brutality that the Vikings displayed towards their prisoners, and their apparent disrespect for anything other than booty must have injected terror into those who experienced, and heard tales of, the Norsemen's exploits. However, the effects of these raids should not be exaggerated. In this phase, there was about one attack per year and the probability of being attacked in any given year was actually quite low. Life went on as normal in Ireland. Nor did the Irish sit back and let the Vikings pillage their coasts. While most Irish attacks on the Vikings met with defeat, a few succeeded.

The Ulaid defeated a band of raiders in 811, a band was defeated in Connaght in 812 and one in Munster around the same time. The Ireland Story "Oxford History of Ireland" The Raids Intensify However, the Vikings were soon to improve their methods of pillaging. Instead of landing 3 or 4 boats, raiding nearby settlements and going back to Scandanavia, they decided to scale-up. They brought between 50 and 100 boats of Viking warriors, landed, and set up a camp. From this base they then raided extensively into the surrounding countryside for a period of several months. They pillaged monasteries, churches, the fortresses of Irish Lords, and farms. In 836 the lands of the southern U� N�ill suffered such an episode. In 837, the same thing happened on the Boyne and Liffey rivers on the east coast and on the Shannon on the west. In 840 the Vikings spent a year on Lough Neagh pillaging, amongst others, the monastery of Armagh. Many of the scholars and monks of Louth monastery were captured and sold into slavery.

In 841 they set up fortified camps at Annagassan (county Louth) and Dubhlinn (present day Dublin). Clonmacnoise, Birr and Clonfert were pillaged and the primate of Armagh was captured and carried off in 845. This was the most intense period of Viking activity, and the Irish Kings seemed to be able to do little to prevent the wholesale destruction of large tracts of their Provinces. The southern U� N�ill were routed by the Vikings when they attempted to drive them out. By the end, many of the monks themselves had taken to fighting the Vikings. However, just as it looked as if Ireland was about to be conquered by the Vikings, and just as the Irish began to develop tactics with which to more effectively attack them, the raids died away. The last major Viking raid of this phase was in 851 by which time they appeared to have turned their attention to Britain. The map below shows the attacks in this period. Meanwhile, many of the Viking settlements developed and grew into towns.

Their town of Dubhlinn had a thriving Norse community by the second half of the 800s, and had become the principal supplier of slaves in the British Isles. In time it became a great merchant town, until it was defeated by an Irish attack in 902. After that, the Vikings moved their power base to the Isle of Man and to the growing territory that the Vikings were carving out of Anglo-Saxon England. Other Viking towns had also been defeated, for example Cork in 848, Vadrefjord [Waterford] in 864 and Youghal in 866. The Second Period of Raids A second phase of raiding began in 914, with the arrival of a large fleet of Viking ships in Waterford harbour. They promptly re-captured their settlement of Vadrefjord [Waterford] from which the Irish had expelled the first Vikings half a century earlier.

Reinforced by a second fleet which arrived the following year, the Vikings launched a series of offensives deep into the province of Munster, and later Leinster, where they met little Irish resistance as they pillaged both ecclesiastical and gr�d Fh�ne (commoner) settlements. They plundered the monasteries of Cork, Lismore and Aghaboe, among others. In 917, the Vikings re-captured the settlement of Dubhlinn [Dublin] which the Irish had captured in 902. The king of the U� N�ill, Niall Gl�ndub, who was the most powerful king in Ireland, decided that the Vikings had to be stopped. He brought together a combined force from the U� N�ill and enlisted the help of the forces of Leinster. They marched against the Vikings in Munster in 917. However, the Vikings routed the Leinstermen, while the forces of the U� N�ill retreated from Munster with no decisive success. Two years later, in 919, Niall Gl�ndub tried again and attacked Dubhlinn.

However, his forces were again routed by the Vikings and Niall Gl�ndub himself was killed and "the cream of the U� N�ill fell with him" [2]. It was not true to say that it was "the Irish against the Vikings". In fact, some Irish kings and lords formed alliances with Vikings to attack other Irish lords. The Vikings continued to raid inland from their towns of Dubhlinn, Cork and Vadrefjord. In 921, they founded a new town on the south-east tip of Ireland called Weisfjord (Wexford) and a year later founded the town of Limerick near a ford at the mouth of the river Shannon on the west coast. The Vikings in Ireland, however, spent a lot of effort consolidating the Nordic Kingdom that their Viking collegeaues had been carving out of Anglo-Saxon England (by defeating and assimilating Northumbria, East Anglia and parts of Mercia - see a map of England before the Vikings came). This kingdom would become known as the Danelaw.

Back in Ireland, as the influence of the Vikings declined, they concentrated more on developing Dubhlinn as a trading city and by 934 exercised control over the other Viking towns in Ireland. In its day, Dubhlinn was one of the most important cities in the Nordic world, as a trading and slaving centre. In 952, Dubhlinn split from the Danelaw and from then on Dubhlinn had its own dynasty of Viking Kings. See below for a map of Ireland around 950. The Vikings eventually settled down in the lands they had conquered. By 950, the Vikings had stopped raiding in Ireland and developed instead as traders and settled in the lands around their towns. The Vikings in England [3] largely became farmers and fishermen. In France, the Vikings formed the Kingdom of Normandy on the north coast - which would play a major role in history a century later when William of Normandy would defeat England in 1066.

The Vikings left many placenames in Ireland including: Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Wexford, Strangford, Leixlip, Carlingford, Youghal, Howth, Dalkey and Fingall [an area of modern-day Dublin]. A few of their words were also adopted into the Irish language. The First High Kings of Ireland Despite these Viking attacks, life continued as normal in Ireland's provinces. As discussed in the previous section , the power of the U� N�ill rose during the 700s and this continued into the 800s. After conquering the province of Airgialla (central Ulster) between 750 and 850, the Northern U� N�ill turned their attention to the eastern province of Ulaid. The Ulaid, recognising the supremacy of the U� N�ill, did not attempt to resist and they were under U� N�ill control by the mid 800s.

The Northern U� N�ill themselves were ruled by the Cen�l nE�gain family, and they were bitterly resented by the Cen�l Conaill of western Ulster and the Ulaid in the east. The southern U� N�ill, on the other hand, had gained control over northern Laigin. Split by the expansion of Connacht into Br�ifne in the 700s, the two halves of the U� N�ill were united again, in the east, by the end of the 800s. Later writings referred to the kings of the U� N�ill as the first High Kings of Ireland, but it seems unlikely that this in reality referred to anything more than an aspiration. After 940, a bitter power struggle broke out between the royal families of the U� N�ill. Foster [2] sums this up as "a united U� N�ill kingdom was in the making, and the struggle was to determine who was to be the ruler of it".

The King of the Northern U� N�ill, Domnall ua N�ill, who was also the overall U� N�ill king, attempted to rule the Southern U� N�ill directly and even garrisoned forces in their territory. The next king was Mael Sechnaill II of the Southern branch. The U� N�ill had gone from being an obscure people in western Ireland to the rulers or controllers of most of northern and eastern Ireland. Although they never really exercised control over Connacht or Munster, their later proponents preferred to style them as the first High Kings. The map below shows how Ireland looked like around 950AD. (This makes an interesting comparison with the map of Ireland three centuries earlier , before the U� N�ill expansion.) Everyday Life in the Viking Period This must have been a terrifying period for the Irish who were subjected to these raids. Scribbled in the margin of a manuscript, the words of a 9th century monk reveal some of the emotion: "The wind is fierce tonight. It tosses the sea's white hair. I fear no wild Vikings, sailing the quiet main" [2].

Many of these hand-written illuminated manuscripts - being of no financial value - were burned by the Vikings and today we only have a handful of those that were written. While these were great setbacks for the ecclesiastical community, few of the monasteries in Ireland failed to resurrect themselves after raids. Unlike Britain and France, where whole monastic communities disappeared, the Irish seem to have been spared the worst of the Vikings' wrath [2]. In fact, Cork monastery was practically next door to the nearby Viking settlement but it emerged from the Viking period largely intact. The ordinary gr�d Fh�ne (commoners) found that their ringforts had been rendered obsolete by the character of the Viking raids. The earthen walls and ditches around their houses may have been an adequate defence against relatively infrequent Irish attacks, but the Vikings came in such numbers that they easily breached the banks to steal animals, plunder and burn property and capture slaves. Thus both ringforts and crannogs fell out of use over the course of the 900s. They were replaced by a more heavily defended underground chamber called a souterrain.

A souterrain is built by digging a deep ditch, lining it with stone walls, putting a roof on it and covering it over. Used mainly as places of refuge, as opposed to storing goods, the tunnels of souterrains could be over 100 metres (330 feet) in length. Although difficult to find due to their hidden nature, over 3500 known souterrains survive in Ireland. Christian Songs Some Celtic Christian songs survive from the Viking period. Perhaps the most famous is Be Thou My Vision, written around 1,200 years ago. It is clearly a reflection of its turbulent times, with its comparison of to God to a "strong tower". Verse three is: Be Thou my breastplate, my sword for the fight, Be Thou my whole armour, be Thou my true might, Be Thou my soul's shelter, be Thou my strong tower, O raise Thou me heavenward, great power of my power. At the start of the Viking period the Irish monasteries consisted of earthen enclosures containing a church, various outbuildings and the monks' residences. The Vikings found that it was very easy to ransack these largely defenseless settlements.

In time, the monks learned how to frustrate the Vikings, by building tall stone towers known as Round Towers. The door was placed one floor up, accessible by a ladder. Inside the tower, each floor was accessed by further ladders. If Vikings were sighted, the Monks would grab as much food and valuables as they could, climb into the tower and pull up the ladder. The Vikings would then raid the empty monastery while the monks watched from the safety of the tower. Even if the Vikings did get into the tower - and they did not try hard to do so - the Monks simply retreated further up the tower by pulling up more ladders. Such a strategy did not save the monastery itself, but did save the Monks and some of their belongings from being captured. Round towers were constructed across Ireland, a large number of which are still intact today. The picture above shows the round tower at Devenish, county Fermanagh [the steps are a modern addition] (photo by Edwin Smith) . [5] Another feature to appear at this time was the High Cross. It was customary for monasteries to display a wooden cross, but from the 700s onwards it became common to carve them from stone.

Some had Biblical scenes carved on them, to assist in teaching the largely illiterate population. Some have theorised that they were made so large to prevent the Vikings from stealing them or knocking them down, although this is conjecture. The picture on the left shows the High Cross at Monasterboice, county Louth (picture from [4]) YaleNews | The Vikings: Yale historian looks at the myths vs. the history The Vikings: Yale historian looks at the myths vs. the history By Dorie Baker March 8, 2013 As a lead-up to the forthcoming History Channel series “Vikings,” Tom Ashbrook, host of NPR’s “On Point,” talked with a foremost authority on the subject — Yale’s Anders Winroth — to de-mystify the legendary raiders of the North. Winroth is professor and director of graduate studies in history. His most recently published book is “The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe” (Yale University Press, 2011). His forthcoming volume, "A New History of the Viking Age,” will be published by Princeton University Press in 2014.

YaleNews spoke with Winroth recently about some of the issues raised in his “On Point” interview. The following is an edited transcript. Why does the Age of the Vikings start in 793 and end in 1066 ? The 793 raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne on the northeast coast of England was the first Viking attack that was written about, and it was a big shock to all of Europe. Alcuin, a great educator in Charlemagne’s court, was a particularly influential person who wrote about it. We see the attack through the eyes of the victims, who spread the word that the Vikings were bloody and violent. In fact, they were violent, but no more than anyone else at the time. Compared to Charlemagne’s armies, the Vikings were amateurs. The Vikings were actually just looking for better places to live and preferred not to kill or be killed for it. We view the 1066 Battle of Hastings, where the Norman descendants of Vikings defeated the Anglo-Saxons and established their own king (William I) in England, as the end of the age of the seafaring Vikings.

Incidentally, it was the battle of Stanford Bridge — just before Hastings — which the Normans lost, that determined their ultimate victory. The Anglo-Saxon army was so depleted by their pyrrhic victory earlier that week that they were unable to hold back their conquerors. Did the Vikings leave any legacy? The most important legacy they left us is our language. Norse words are so imbedded in modern English that we’re unaware of them, while we’re more apt to notice the French and Latin derived words in our vocabulary. Roberta Frank in the Yale English department came up with a paragraph that she allowed me to use in my book "A New History of the Viking Age,” which — with the exception of articles and prepositions — is composed entirely of Norse-derived words. The first sentence is: The odd Norse loans seem an awesome window onto a gang of ungainly, rugged, angry fellows, bands of low rotten crooks winging it at the stern's wake, sly, flawed “guests” who, craving geld, flung off their byrnies, thrusting and clipping calves and scalps with clubs. Besides the English language, did they make any other lasting contributions to Western civilization?

I often say the Vikings introduced the Western world to death and taxes. Their raids obviously killed a lot of people, and when they attacked, Europeans realized they had to shape up to repel them. That meant kings had to raise money, and after they got what they could from the Church, they had to start taxing the people. The Norse invaders were determined to get what they wanted, and they continued to demand more and more both by threatening to strike and by kidnapping and charging enormous ransoms. Churches became impoverished. In 994 they threatened to burn down the Canterbury Cathedral unless the archbishop paid them off with a large sum of money. The archbishop, who a few decades earlier had controlled the most wealth in England at the time, had already paid them so much that he had to borrow money from another bishop. Their constant threat also inspired kings to get their military organized. Did they have any other economic impact? The Vikings, who were as much traders as marauders, also helped Europe create money, which allowed commerce to take off. In Russia they met up with Arab merchants who used silver coins (dirhams) to pay for the Vikings’ slaves and fur.

Currency was not a novel idea in western Europe, but there was a desperate lack of it, since gold and silver was rare. The Norsemen introduced gold and silver from the rich Arab Caliphate. Bartering no longer needed to be the means of exchange. Interestingly, schoolchildren on field trips in Scandinavia sometimes still find dirhams. Not long ago a boy found a trove of 16,000 coins, all made of silver that the Arabs had acquired in Afghanistan, at the easternmost point of their wide-reaching empire. Did the Vikings have a “softer side”? The Vikings excelled in the decorative arts — embellishing functional objects like swords and runic inscriptions, and crafting beautiful adornments, especially jewelry. Many Viking decorative motifs were adopted by the scribes who made illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages. The idea that the Vikings introduced “democratic government” to places where they settled is largely a Romantic myth, but they did found the city of Dublin, among others. It is also untrue that the Vikings were in any way more egalitarian toward women than the rest of the world at the time. We often use — misuse? — the terms “Viking” and “Norman” interchangeably.

Is there a difference? Yes, the Normans were essentially the descendants of the original Vikings who settled in northern France and the Frankish natives of the region. In your “On Point” interview you suggest that those who became Vikings were losers in their own land, because if they had succeeded as landowners and farmers, they would have stayed home. Is that right? Not quite, but the Vikings were looking for opportunities that they didn’t have at home, and I think they were largely younger brothers who wouldn’t inherit property. So the Vikings really didn't wear horns on their helmets? No. That was the invention of the costume designer for the first production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” in 1876. 1000+ images about 793 on Pinterest | The father, This morning and The vikings Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas 793 In AD 793, Viking Raiders sacked the Monastery at Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of England, or what was then the kingdom of Northumbria.

Although there is an earlier recorded incident in which Northman killed an English sheriff on a beach (probably due to a misunderstanding), the raid on Lindisfarne is widely considered the event marking the start of the Viking Age. 38 Pins737 Followers

Question: What was the first English monastery to be sacked by the Norsemen
Answer: Lindisfarne